Making the metropolis elusive

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En fuite, on foot, in thought: Making the metropolis elusive Sally‐Ann Murray

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Associate professor of English Studies , University of KwaZulu‐Natal , Durban Published online: 01 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Sally‐Ann Murray (2005) En fuite, on foot, in thought: Making the metropolis elusive, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 17:2, 102-124, DOI: 10.1080/1013929X.2005.9678223 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2005.9678223

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En Fuite, on Foot, in Thought: Making the Metropolis Elusive Sally-Ann Murray Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (eds). 2004. Public Culture 16(3), Special Issue, “Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis”. Durham NC: Duke University Press. The general claim of “Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis” is that this city is influential by virtue of a human possibility presently in formation. This human potential is reconfiguring the limitations of the apartheid spatial inheritance, the volatility of the democratic street, and the apparent superficiality of consumer culture. Among other matters, I consider the meanings given, across the volume, to intellectuals ‘walking in the city’; to the metonymic use of ‘voice’; to urban ethnography as a means of embodying Johannesburg’s citiness; to the omission from the volume of Johannesburg as represented in fiction. These considerations all enter my argument that affirming ‘the metropolitan’ as a preferred marker of modern South African identity is more complex in its implications than is allowed by the essays in this collection.

The guest editors of “Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis”, Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, are both based in Johannesburg at WISER, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. This affiliation attests to their status as South/African intellectuals with an international profile and mobility, and implies that they have been prompted by the claims of residence in this city to think about some of the shapes and forms of a situated urban identity. Cities have long been recognised as the overdetermined sites of both material existence and creative identity formation; yet under the perverse determinant that was Apartheid, the tendency has been to “read the city [of Johannesburg] as nothing but the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and coercive and segregationist policies” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:353). The editors suggest that this position has been entrenched by the dominant research paradigms of South African

CURRENT WRITING 17(2) 2005 ISSN 1013-929X

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anthropology and development studies, further bolstered by a predisposition to construe the commercial culture prevalent in cities as inherently insidious or banal. Such habits of understanding, they argue, have diminished academics’ ability and willingness to think of current Johannesburg as a form of metropolitan modernity, an urban space in which consciousness and identity are creatively influenced by imaginative projection into style, new genres, movement, community, and built environment. In “Writing the World from an African Metropolis” (2004:347-72), Mbembe and Nuttall set out to free Johannesburg from the burden of its dominant (mis)representation, inspired by the city’s lived potential as a significant site of ‘Afropolitanism’ which derives from a history of racial mixing as well as “its infrastructure, its global connectedness and its access to the rest of Africa” (McGregor 2005:33). Johannesburg, despite continuing racial-economic divisions, is envisaged as a ‘people city’ of inventive and ambitious human possibility that cannot be reduced to “a nursery of cynicism” and “a site of lack” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:355). In trying to reposition Johannesburg, the editors organise the special issue into two sections. In the first are “academic-style essays” which highlight “a field of changing matrices of identity, power, and culture” across a city which is characterised by “multiplicity” and “experiences of flux” (2004:367). I found the jargon of the Introduction intrusive, even while I recognised it as a device intended to declare the theoretical fluency of African intellectuals in global academic debates, and to give ‘Africa’ – and, by implication, particularly Johannesburg – an agency which exceeds the field work subject favoured by foreigners. Mbembe’s “Aesthetics of Superfluity” (2004:373-405) is the best example of the conceptual complexity for which the volume reaches; it is an essay in which his configuration of Johannesburg as metropolis brushes tantalisingly against his ideas in On the Postcolony, where modern social theories are said to be over-reliant on Western Europe’s provincialism, while the African postcolony is dominated by an aesthetics of vulgarity and “a desire for majesty” (2001:131). Mbembe on superfluity animates a virtuoso intellectual breadth inspired by Marx, Braudel, Arendt, Simmel … in order to link Johannesburg’s topographical surface, superfluous money, casino style and transitional humanity into a political economy of the expendable and the indispensable. He pushes his reader towards abstraction in order to demonstrate the difficulty of theorising Johannesburg as a metropolis, and proposes that under conditions of superfluity this city is simultaneously “reduced to an empty set” and

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“paradoxically, gains depth” (2004:400). The conceptual flights left me grasping after more grounded, ordinary representations of ideas, but I was also caught up in Mbembe’s sophisticated acrobatics: a ‘European’ treatment of Johannesburg, in which city space and critical theory are deftly handled by an evident African master. The subsequent essays move between idea and experience in trying to represent Johannesburg as a place of emergent potential. In “People as Infrastructure” (2004:407-429), AbdouMaliq Simone, despite the initial wrong-footing of an instrumentalist title, writes an intriguing, New Journalistic experiential cartography of the changing communities of inner city Johannesburg: “Underneath Highpoint Center is a cavernous parking garage. The last time I ventured there, by mistake at two in the morning some two years ago, I found hundreds of women, adherents of the Zionist Christian Church, kneeling in unison” (2004:413). Yes, there be dragons in such depths. Yet Simone’s encounters also suggest that many of these are only unfamiliar aspects of democratic citiness in the making. Next is Sarah Nuttall’s “Stylizing the Self: The Y Generation in Rosebank” (2004:430452), another piece which deliberately takes the reader beneath the city’s supposedly superficial surface in order to investigate the hip cross-over scene of Jozi’s racially-fluid contemporary urban youth culture. Beyond “the verbal cultures and spatial logics that have so often governed our interpretative frames until now” (2004:251), fashion labels, consumer magazines, kwaito music, township chic, trendy design stores … all are “jamming, remixing, and remaking cultural codes and signifiers from the past”, suturing different economic and cultural imaginaries into maps of identity which supersede the racial constraints and resistance politics of earlier generations even as they point to “a gap of potential, between what is and what could ... form a stylistics of the future” (2004:439). This is not a new idea (Murray 1994) but it clearly bears remaking against the more recent argument of the Comaroffs, for instance, who find the neoliberal surface of millennial capitalism an inadequately analytical space (2001). Nuttall presents a stylish counter case, arguing that “the making of the contemporary [youth] self is not …easily readable” (2004:440), especially given the altered urbanisms of post-apartheid, and she explores urban spatialities as negotiated on and through the body as “enigmatic and divergent ways of knowing” far beyond trite ‘accessorising’. Implicit, too, are the limits of cultural translatability: despite substantial academic and experiential investment in her material, Nuttall in The Zone @ Rosebank

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seems to have found herself trying to pin down an evasive subject matter which would not easily submit to her disciplinary vocabulary. I was left feeling that life for the Y generation means a lot more – and is a lot more uncertain – than a “convergence between the verbal, the visual, and the sonic [which] marks a displacement of logocentric aesthetic hierarchies [and] ... demands an alternative grammar of accessorization” (Nuttall 2004:446). The present, it seems, is also another country. The final essay, a form of urban anthropological field work combining facts, biographies and a cultural studies interest in walking in the city, is by WISER associate Frédéric Le Marcis. “The Suffering Body of the City” (2004:453-477) analyses the paradox, experienced most harshly by impoverished black South Africans, that the newly-acquired sovereignty of democratic freedom has coincided with the AIDS epidemic: “People obtained their freedom and fell sick at the same time” (2004:453). This has “enabled individuals to explore previously unavailable urban spaces, to develop innovative forms of political mobilization, and to access…health services that had once been forbidden to them” (2004:453-4). Yet it also reveals the limits of metropolitanism by emphasising that for the ill, indigent person living on the periphery of ‘the metropolis’, “mobility is not a temporary state but…the very condition of survival” (2004:276). If you are poor and infected in the city, when you finally stop walking, you are dead. The second part of the special issue is subtitled “Voice-Lines”, and consists of short pieces and interviews intended to bring “Johannesburg into being as a metropolis” by “generat[ing] the voices of the city itself” and by “ventur[ing] into the realm of sensory intimation” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:369). The approach here is a necessary, more colloquial counterbalance to section one, and a reader is likely to enjoy the relaxed, associative, interview format of several of the pieces, albeit noticing that it is the editors who are the recurrent guides. That said, it remains awkward that Mbembe and Nuttall assert, with the surely unintentional yet surprisingly italicised authority of dictators, that their directive on Johannesburg is “to make it talk” (2004:369). In this ruthless intellectual economy, analogous to mining’s eviscerations of Johannesburg, the vocabularies “are not always academic” (no surprise when you’re being made to talk), and are meant to “point to themes and realities that have…outpaced academic research” (2004:370). So the meanings of Johannesburg as metropolis are elusive, en fuite – in flight, escaping – but the purpose in 16(3) is temporarily to ground or stop this movement so that readers may study (interrogate?) the city’s shape and

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its life forms. Partly, the implication is that through the application of theoretical discourse Johannesburg will ‘come alive’ for readers, a character previously hidden will be revealed; but the corollary is that because most theoreticians and “mainstream academic practice[s]” (2004:370) are entombed in a deathly lack of animation, out of touch with ‘life’, scholarly work on the living city must be guided by various lively streetwalkers if it is to walk the walk and talk the talk of relevance. This contradiction has bedevilled the research of all intellectuals interested in contemporary urban cultures, and so in conjunction with ‘voice’ and ‘walking’, which I will discuss later, the editors of 16(3) turn to “nonconventional itineraries and mappings, such as those of journalists, artists, architects, and young people” (2004:370). Here, the “nonconventional” is probably not a marker of the youthful suss or street cred of the contributors per se (all of whom are established in fairly conventional, rule-governed professions), but implies the editors’ attempt to shift readers’ imaginative-conceptual reception of Johannesburg by blurring the concrete and the creative, crossing disciplinary distinctions and materials and thereby moving academic discourse into ostensibly more popular conversational registers and situations. “Voice-Lines” opens with journalist John Matshikiza on “Instant City” (2004:481-497), a semi-autobiographical positioning of Joburg in relation to some of the African cities in which black South Africans experienced exile. He depicts this historical “African mecca” (2004:483) as a place of opportunity which is yet lacerated by a xenophobia which threatens the ostensible cosmopolitanism of life in a metropolis, and suggests that Dakar extended to him a homely African humanity that has been denied him in a South Africa which ostracised blackness as foreign. There follows “Soweto Now” (2004:499-506), Mbembe in discussion with Nsizwa Dlamini and Grace Khunou, both WISER doctoral fellows, focussing on the mobile nature of post-apartheid space in order to show how the lives (or should that be ‘lived itineraries’?) of black people in Soweto increasingly encompass township and suburb, producing fluid identities and allegiances. The subsequent ‘voice-line’ is “From the Ruins” (2004:507-519), the text of “a walking conversation” between Sarah Nuttall and “Mark Gevisser, content advisor to Constitution Hill’s Heritage, Education, and Tourism team” (2004:508). In talking, walking and writing the reader through the spatial histories of Constitution Hill, this piece successfully captures the uncertainties of urban reinvention: how can the Old Fort, a site with multiple carceral histories, be regenerated as democratic public space

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symbolic of South African constitutional ideals? Then we have “Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project” (2004:521-531), in which wellknown South African architect Lindsay Bremner takes us inside the architectural competition held to promote the redevelopment of Freedom Square, the site of the ANC’s Congress of the People in 1955. In the spirit of Lefebvre, Bremner’s paper implies that South African architecture should see Kliptown not as “eradicated urbanity” (2004:529), but as a place of “the possible”, connected both to the urban vitality of the people who use the space and to architecture’s reclaiming, from what is presently a built environment of anxious urban control, its “prerogative of poetic interpretation” (2004:529). Finally, there is “A Laboratory of Uncertainty” (2004:532-547), in which Nuttall ‘speaks’ to Rodney Place, idiosyncratic Johannesburg architect and multimedia artist. He offers a sur-real figurative mapping, a “metro-allegory” (2004:536) “of Johannesburg fashioned from the bits and pieces of visual-linguistic urban detritus that comprise his work as artist and his working ideas about an aesthetics of industria”. For Place, Johannesburg is “a misguided machine waiting to be put to more useful, continental purpose” (2004:535). Clearly, “The Elusive Metropolis” is a strategic intervention in international debates over the built and bodily forms of urban life and culture, an intervention not only about but from South Africa, a place in which the national and international are experiencing dramatically new connection. True, claims for the possibilities of reconfiguring apparently commodified urban space through imaginative cultural investment are no longer radical; they have become an expected form of authority across many disciplines in the Human and Social Sciences. Yet the muddled hopes and fears of South Africa’s difficult democratic present do offer a provocative space in which to try out these ideas in relation to Johannesburg as influential city and to test, by extension, the applicability of Johannesburg’s metropolitanism to other South African cities. Although not rich in personalised narratives of Johannesburg citiness, the volume hints at the strangely poetic nature of a city imaginary as both a potential to be realised in a person, and one to be realised in a city by people, and in turning readers’ attention to the curious making of urban selves and communities, the volume implies that the concrete city can become an unexpected, multifaceted persona. As children of 1960s Durban, my sister and I liked to think ourselves ‘Durban girls’ as we basked in the borrowed beach glamour of South Africa’s favourite holiday city. Yet it was

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Johannesburg, fondly familiarised in our imaginative minitown as Joburg or Joeys, which was the Big Apple of our fantasies. Johannesburg was the South African city: it had the Carlton Centre, a skyhigh ice-rink, Diagonal Street, and the shopping mall. When South Africa eventually got TV, it came to us from Auckland Park in Joburg. Van Riebeeck may have arrived in Cape Town, but every child knew that it was only when gold was discovered in Johannesburg that South Africa really began. As Georges Perec’s (1997) erratic method might suggest, this is not merely the circumscribed Johannesburg of personal nostalgia; it is part of the mysterious sub-ways of consciousness through which a material city and a city of the imagination become a conjoint centre of activity: a metropolis. Overseas was for us somewhere else again, the fabulous glamour that featured in film advertisements for Peter Stuyvesant, and Mainstay, persuading us that through consumption the world could become a suburb of your own neighbourhood, Joburg or not. In fact, the editors of 16(3) remind us that African cities are not a world apart; they are embedded in “multiple elsewheres” (2004:348) which unevenly overlay Africanness with other forms of identity and affiliation. International desire, for those in a South African city, may draw on images of first-class worldliness and classy first worldliness that come from film, fiction, built space, but this desire also sits alongside appropriations and inventions which are markedly African, unsettling received urban practices of planning, architecture and social organisation, and remaking them into provisional forms in which mimesis entails not merely imitation but invention. Certainly, to represent Johannesburg as a metropolis is to imply more than the mere efficiency and urban sufficiency of its metropolitan management. (Somewhere between the extremes of Lagos and LA, with London a stop on the way?) It is a gesture of superfluity meant to position this city as particularly significant because it exceeds actual and imaginative limits; it is at once a magnetic attractor of investment, skills, culture, and a rocket that launches the local into international consciousness: Paris, New York, London, Tokyo … Johannesburg. Second Greatest City After Paris. As McGregor remarks in a recent Sunday Times piece on ‘Afropolitans’ such as Mbembe and Nuttall: “They could be successful in London, Paris, or New York, but they opt to live here …. Johannesburg is the city of choice” (2005:33). In effect, in producing “The Elusive Metropolis”, Mbembe and Nuttall appropriate for what was once a colonial margin the self-confident agency and aura of the metropolitan centre, insisting that a

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metropolitan identity is as much a matter of imaginative belief as of fact. The idea, I suppose, is both a variant of the Little Engine Who Could (I think I can I think I can I can I can) and an imagineer’s tweaking of ‘I think therefore I am’. Big thoughts of a city can bring big things into being, far in excess of the initial brick and mortar sum of a city’s built substance. Conventionally, a city’s metropolitan arrival is announced through a distinctive mega-building and/or event, the Eiffel Tower’s signifying of Paris well beyond the 1889 Exposition being the obvious example. The mundane ‘metro’, the fiscal-administrative entity of municipal government, is re-imagined through structural and rhetorical monumentalisms into an expressive “dream and function” (Barthes 1982:239), a rate of global exchange visible and viable across tourism, design, the Bourse. Johannesburg has its tall towers, as well as the phoenix of urban regeneration and pinnacles of investment, but as the editors of Public Culture emphasise for their readers, it is the accumulated mine waste, at once discarded dump and mimic mountain, which remains the most sublime signifier of this city. The mine dump blurs depth and surface; it dominates some parts of the city, and then seems to disappear in others; it represents the rapacious gold mining upon which the city was founded, as well as the more shifting spaces of film location, manmade nature, entertainment, crime, commerce and consumption which comprise Johannesburg’s present as South Africa’s largest city. An important text lying just beneath the surface of “Johannesburg: the Elusive Metropolis”, part of its prehistory if you like, is Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislaviƒ’s blank: architecture, apartheid and after. This unusual “catalogue for an exhibition” acknowledges that in South Africa, “architecture and town planning are inextricably connected with politics and culture” (Feireiss 1998:np) but, like the Mbembe and Nuttall volume, eshews the research tradition which emphasises sociopolitical exploitation and even apocalypse. Collectively the contributions in blank (covering architecture, journalism, geography, photography, art history, literary study, sociology, creative writing, town planning…) reconfigure the blunt facts of the South African built environment through narrative and image in order to tell “a story about the architecture of South Africa” (Feireiss 1998:np). This reworking was announced when you opened the book: out fell a brightyellow, rectangular piece of cardboard giving the contributors and the coordinates which would enable you to plot your route to the piece you wanted. With form and contents turned topsy turvy, blank is a platform for some remarkable South African analysis of city space, among them that of

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geographer Jenny Robinson, who uses Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying (1995) to argue that people reinvent even the rigid lineations of the racial city. (Also contributing to blank are Lindsay Bremner and AbdouMaliq Simone.) It’s worth remembering the startling qualities of the Judin and Vladislaviƒ volume because it becomes one measure of Public Culture 16(3), in which the editors have elected not to include any articles focussing on ‘literary’ or imaginative representations of Johannesburg as a place. This lack of ‘story’ is a major failure of “The Elusive Metropolis”. There are occasional nods towards literature, as in Nuttall’s brief situating of the fashion label Stoned Cherrie in relation to Drum, Lewis Nkosi, and the Sophiatown counterculture of the 1950s. But it cannot be adequate to reduce imaginative writing to an instrumental epigraph from Sarah Gertrude Millin, or to Gordimer’s The House Gun which is referenced in a footnote. I am perplexed by this omission, especially given the editors’ emphasis on the aesthetic as an influence upon Johannesburg’s metropolitan status. Imaginative writing would intersect with the debates about surfaces and depths which feature prominently in the Introduction, where the editors reiterate that because Johannesburg is a city built on the mining of resources (poor black people, as much as gold), it is a metropolis with complicated actual and ethical depths. Through this emphasis, they hope to reveal “the limits of classical theories of the metropolis, which hold that the most revelatory facets of modern metropolitan life lie on the surface, in the ephemeral and visible (shop fronts, shop windows, café terraces…), in the display of the commodity with or without its aesthetic veil” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:363, original emphasis). Such apparently superficial aspects of the modern metropolis can be rehabilitated as deep, in the sense of complex and ambiguously meaningful, if not intrinsically valuable. In this context, depth of the imaginative sort, subtle ‘stories’ of citiness, would have been a welcome feature. Novels, stories, poems would have substantiated the editors’ claim that people’s use of the city is a form of poesis developed around both walking and more conventional, text-based notions of narrative and image. Without my having to claim a deeper meaningfulness for literature over other cultural practices, I suggest that the inclusion of imaginative writing would have confirmed the point that Johannesburg is more than a city of brittle, glossy surfaces concealing a darker underneath; that it has strange, incoherent nuances of human self and inventive sociality. Le Marcis observes that Johannesburg as a “city hardly

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exists without [the] ... submerged component” of the cemetery, “the depths in which the scraps and the remains [of the AIDS sufferer] finally come to rest” (2004:476); an article on Johannesburg in imaginative literature could have made poignant connection with these terrible human ‘pieces’, as well as implying the incredible liveliness and resilience of the city’s ongoing human life. Novels, short fiction, poems…these are expressive forms which tell both obvious and hidden stories; which affirm the city as a place of human bodies which experience joy and pain. So-called literary genres could give an interior life to a Johannesburg which readers of Public Culture might otherwise persist in imagining as the most monumental of South African cities, a hostile agglomeration of malls, office parks, gated communities, highways, mines, townships and urban decay. The list of relevant writers includes Phaswane Mpe, Nadine Gordimer, Ivan Vladislaviƒ Lesego Rampolokeng, Chris van Wyk, Darryl Accone… Even the official Johannesburg website refers to works of fiction in which Johannesburg features. My attributing a ‘life’ to literature raises the issue of voice. In South African cultural research, ‘voice’ was probably the metaphor of the 1990s, gradually superseding an earlier emphasis on ‘ways of seeing’ because of an apparently more embodied capacity to convey the experience of the silenced themselves, rather than the objectified, perspectivally-directed looking, staring, surveying, gazing upon mute subjects. Similarly, both post-apartheid and postmodernity have encouraged architects and planners to go beyond monumental built form and discursive monumentalism to make the city ‘more real’, more human, by acknowledging people’s vocal presence. What do people say about cities? What does the design of a city say about the ways in which space is managed and imagined? Here, particularly South African political inflections of voice are linked to a contemporary cultural studies interest in the body, and hence identity, as diversely sensory. Yet voice remains a problematic metonymy. In the present volume, for instance, voice is sometimes the authenticating tool of a version of urban ethnography based on long-established academic understanding which rescues the representation of citiness from the more transitory, unthinking ‘sight-seeing’ of tourist encounter. Voice is also heard in the interviews, and is made colloquial and informal in the conversations. Sometimes the academic is the representative ethnographic witness, as in Nuttall’s piece on Y culture which traces “an ethnography of its forms” (2004:451).

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Elsewhere, the academic nudges the ethnographic subject from the margins towards the degree of consciousness and articulacy required by the intellectual centre. This occurs quite explicitly in Mbembe’s “conversation” (2004:499) with Dlamini and Khunou, which aims to produce one among several possible “postliberation ethnographies of everyday life in the township” (2004:499), and more subtly in Nuttall and Gevisser’s walking conversation on Constitution Hill. My point is not to dismiss the power of voice. Gevisser ‘speaks’ with an attractive intimacy of the various meanings of the site: in his childhood, in the distant Boer past, in the more recent apartheid space-time. Similarly, the ‘voices’ of Dlamini and Khunou have an experiential immediacy that allows me to imagine that I have connected with some putatively whole body of life in the township, a knowledge that has been denied me not only by apartheid, but by the preferred textual foci and critical objectivity of traditional English Studies. Doubtless, though, the editors would concede that even contemporary, rehabilitative “ethnogging”, in Dening’s caustic term (2003:226), is marked by ideological limitations, and they might also agree that ethnographies inevitably communicate as much about the ethnographer as about ‘the people’ and ‘the culture’ being studied. Yet if Mbembe and Nuttall are too astute to imagine that ‘voices’ simply speak for themselves, this is partly what they seem to hope for in 16(3), for they do not overtly work with the fact that the ‘representative voice’ is always a phantom presence, a powerfully-persuasive spirit summoned through an interested intermediary. Instead (and while forgoing the fictions and fabrications of literary story), the editors invoke the ‘real’ voices of ethnographic field work to give human presence and urban credibility to the volume. Perhaps, poignantly, these are meant to compensate for the relative silence and irrelevance to which academic commentators have been reduced under the government-beholden pedagogic instrumental-ism which is one aspect of South Africa’s metropolitan modernity? All of which bring me to Michel de Certeau. Once upon a time the impoverished European artist starved in what would become the spatial cliché of the city garret; now, across the globe, the academic walks in, into, and increasingly under the city, at once produced by and producing ‘the popular’ and able to access a deeper version of social and individual self than that institutionalised by the straw man of the ivory tower. Particularly influential has been de Certeau’s by-now famous “Walking in the City”, originally a section in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). In theorising

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Johannesburg, Mbembe and Nuttall acknowledge a debt to de Certeau, valuing his take on city space as tactically inventive multiplicity even as they question his neglect of “the fact that striating openness and flow depend on a whole series of rules, conventions, and institutions of regulation and control; and that much of city life is about the engineering of certainty” (2004:361). Reservations aside (and perhaps because the editors are not overly interested in this “engineering of certainty”), de Certeau is everywhere in 16(3), whether in named citation or as a shadowy doppelganger, in papers that essay Johannesburg as place of shifting social and experiential horizons that complicate established “metanarratives of urbanization, modernization, and crisis” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:353). It is ideas popularised in academic discourse by de Certeau which enable the editors to conceive of Johannesburg as a city space in formation through “new critical pedagogies” and forms of poesis, among them “writing, talking, seeing, walking, telling, hearing, drawing, making – each of which pairs the subject and the object in novel ways to enliven the relationship between them and to better express life in motion” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:352). Without a doubt, these ideas offer suggestive approaches to Johannesburg as an influentially emergent South African urban spatiality, and thus a prospective polity, in which “young city dwellers in motion reinvent the geography of the township in the city, putting disparate places next to each other, creating personal maps” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:371). However, the selection of papers in the volume also sketches another, very faint shadow map which either those invited to contribute to the special edition, or the editors themselves, were less interested in drawing. Where, for instance, was the article which showed that even those historically privileged by the city have not unproblematically bought into the myth of Johannesburg as a worldly city with cosmopolitan reach? William Kentridge comes to mind. This South African artist with a significant international reputation recalls the Johannesburg of his youth as a “rather desperate provincial city” (1992:np), and has in his art shown the rapacious apartheid industrialist agreeing in a grandiose sweep to “‘buy the whole fucking dump’” (qtd Stewart 2005:63). How does Kentridge’s heretical take align with the dangerous monomanias of confident metropolitan ‘development’? The editors are eager to represent Johannesburg now, and especially to make the point that the received racial-social fixity of Johannesburg’s city space is dramatically en fuite. This entails a focus on the meanings of the city for black South Africans, for whom democracy has brought actual and

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imaginative opportunities of metropolitan modernity well beyond the once fundamental South African ‘mobility’ of migrant labour and the unhomely ‘settlement’ of domestic work. Consequently, missing from the volume are traces of the manifold minor histories of white Johannesburg life which surely contribute to the city’s past and its emergent present. The metropolitan self which is being claimed for contemporary Johannesburg needs a deeper human history. We don’t get this in any detail in Public Culture 16(3); not even in the non-conventional itineraries of the voice-lines. I responded to the editors’ attempts to move readers’ understandings of Johannesburg out of cynicism towards possibility, but I also wanted to be moved by mobility as practice; to have the metaphor muddle up against people, rather than keep its careful academic distance – even in conversation. How did Nuttall, for example, come to be the kind of open-minded, metropolitan Johannesburger that she is? It did not all happen in Rosebank. How has her experience shaped her interest in the present forms of this city? In order to answer such questions, the academic writer does not need to lapse into confessional mode, but s/he would have to delve into the fossilised layers of self in which theory, story and autobiography are banded together. Think of it this way: in her piece on the Y generation and the stylisation of self, Nuttall characterises the suburban commercial district of Rosebank’s The Zone as a hybrid urban geography which “turn[s] the notion of public space inside out” (2004:434). It might have been fascinating to try something similar with the formation of some Johannesburg selves, turning the notion of private space towards the city street. (Perhaps this connects, again, to the gap in the special issue where imaginative writing might have pumped its blood?) There is something of this living city missing from volume 16(3) where, despite best intentions, forms of humanity in a major city become academic case-studies, theory ‘re-dresses’ shifting black identity into stable intellectual shape, and the excitement and surprises of city experience become intellectually respectable markers of the metropolitan. It’s got to be more than that. Through de Certeau, for instance, I can retrospectively re-imagine the traces of my own 1960s white girlhood in Durban, in the process giving new potency to the familiar expression ‘the apartheid movement’. If Durban, for my sister and me, was variously Notmetropolis and Notremetropolis, it was also deeply metropolitan in the original sense of a ‘mother city’, for the space was made known to us by a mother who had an imaginative drive that denied monetary limit. There was no car, and hardly more cash, yet she was

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determined to give us the opportunities of children richer, but surely never better. And this meant we had to walk. From Umbilo to what seemed almost everywhere. Barely into primary school when the walking began, our absolute limits were Brighton Beach and Japanese Gardens, places by any measure on the peripheries of the city. For us, weekend Durban was an inexhaustible, exhilarating, but exhausting world of beaches, bug-houses, churches, fetes, department stores, libraries, museums, markets, piers, port terminals, plays, parks, picnics, stations…. The walking was not in the spirit of flânerie (although we often walked at night), for however leisurely our appearance and manner, whatever small pleasures we found on route, we walked with determined purpose. The slow, pedestrian dedication (if you didn’t walk, with your own two feet, you weren’t going anywhere) meant that the streets of downtown Durban, Maydon Wharf, the Berea, Umgeni Road, the Bluff…were not merely surfaces to cover but spaces which acquired a certain intimacy. We learnt, through walking, about many other things: human geography (the imposing houses set apart in leafy gardens which distinguished Upper Morningside from ‘Scumbilo’); historical change and memorialising (“But what’s a cenotaph for, really?”); and social (dis)graces (“Don’t you dare say snot in Greenacres!”) Without, at the time, the benefit of de Certeau, Augé, or similar, through movement I pieced together experiential maps of my existing environment and tried to imagine the future to which we were heading. For, early on, we understood that we were not ‘just walking’. Beneath the walking lay a philosophy which exhorted us to push the limits of where we could go, in life as much as in leisure. Our mother, herself one of thirteen and raised by hand and foot slog in Bloemfontein’s St Faith’s ‘home’ for poor children – believed utterly in the city as an emblem of modern opportunity. It was important that we learn, as young as possible, that nothing came easy. You had to go to great lengths to get what you might feel you deserved. Anyway, walking made you a better person, a person better able, more fit, to live resourcefully in the fullness of life which a city represented, even a smallish city like Durban, more ‘home town’ than global metropolis. Living successfully in a city meant making the most of everything in order to make the most of yourself. Or did you (the implicit threat was ‘like your father’?) want to turn out an irresponsible waste, or even an alkie, or a prossie? The properly moral consciousness would work hard (walk hard?) to resist the allure of easeful abandon, and thus avoid the otherwise inevitable slide. Some parts of city life were so dark, so void of future and hope, that they formed an underworld into which it was better not to venture. Still, the 115

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walking encouraged in me an eagerness to test my limits, and made me learn to pretend nonchalance at failures. I spent my childhood walking towards the only city I really knew, intent on making it. (And aside from a brief life in the more global urbanity of San Francisco, I live there still, in a metropolitanism familiarised by personal history….) Wryness aside, the remembering makes it clear that the very use of walking to get somewhere in the city of Durban was a surprising, difficult lesson for a white child in 1960s South Africa. In part, our mother was suggesting that there were places beyond the boundaries of our immediate knowledge, and that these boundaries were worth identifying, and striving for. At the same time, though, we had to see that these limits required changing if we, class outsiders, were to gain admittance to the privileged interior. However desirable the city, sometimes its promise was a deception. Whatever the assertions of the white government, and never mind the confident South Africa of Panorama, poor white children had no god-given urban inheritance. So yes, walking helped to drive home the goal of metropolitan consciousness – one route to social arrival and reinvention of self – but the journeys also required of us tentatively different forms of consciousness which prodded the white family into fragile forms of ‘nonracial’, if not cosmopolitan, citiness. Beyond the immediately known neighbourhood of the corporation flats, the people we encountered in our walking were invariably black adults, seldom with black children. The women usually wore servants’ overalls, occasionally white robes, or smart dresses. On several occasions, we saw black women whose breasts were strung with layers of beads and strips of fabric, animal tails and oddly inflated balloons flailing against their legs, their daubed faces almost hidden by curtains of greased, beaded hair. There was no space we could allot such insistent difference in our own emerging modernity; ‘witch doctors’ (more frightening without the scare quotes) were part of a separate ‘tribal’ culture that existed at the edges of the suburban city. The more domesticated female figures were part of our story. They often lugged packets, bulky bodies balanced by an amazing grace of weight upon the head. They spoke deferentially, sometimes with delicately-offered female friendship, surprised by our walking the streets, shaking their heads at the distance. Were we in trouble? Where was the master? Ey, but it is hard with no husband. They were walking to the bus stop to catch the Green Mamba, or going to their rooms, to the shops, to church, or home to the farm. We shared a few sweets, some words; we never saw the same women twice.

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Only many, many like them, all living without their children, without their husbands. The men we met were more reticent, generally passing with only a murmured ’sbona or a formal inclination of the head. Perhaps it had to do with masculine dignity or, I now think, with a concern not to be considered dangerously forward, threatening the private body of white females walking beyond the customary guardianship of the Boss. So the street was an ordinary but also enigmatic place. As a socio-cultural space produced by the divisive facts and implicit dangers of 1960-70s South Africa, it enabled the privacy and unfathomed secrecies of individual footsteps, yet the pavement moments hinted at the contradictory promise – excitement, comfort, uncertainty – of shared human being. Ridiculously rosy; but even in retrospect this seems one of the humane, chance possibilities associated with the more ambitiously self-seeking metropolitanism in which I was being schooled. Race, anyway, was the least of our troubles on the streets – laws made sure of that. Much more ambiguous were white men with wheels. Exhausted, we sometimes accepted lifts from strangers, always white men since they had the cars, and always unaccompanied by women, since men alone were the ones who stopped. Our mother whispered caution (“He is not your uncle”) but mostly the drivers were ‘gentlemen’, their established South African order of things unsettled in finding such homely femaleness walking the street. On occasion they turned out to be smooth-talkers who skidded around corners in order to lurch our mother against them. Sometimes they were old soaks who bought ice-creams for the kiddies as the predictable prelude to propositioning the mother. And as we discovered, even officials could turn threatening; the city was an extremely ambiguous space. Returning from a daylong picnic down the South Coast, we were accosted after dark near Congella station by two authoritative white policemen: “Please, lady, be sensible. Get into the vehicle. It’s not safe outside. Think about the little girls.” Kids in the back of the van, mother upfront, the boys in blue spent the short ride hitting on our mother, confident that she would feign calm so as not to upset the captive audience. We saw it all, and felt fear both for what might be, and for the confusedly fixed yet labile complicity of the pretence which appeared to be the duty of grown-up womanhood. Walking – and being taken for the occasional ride – was an excellent city education for the white girl who hoped to become part of a rising urban middle class. Admittedly, it was not completely clear to us that because we were white children, albeit battling, we at least had some key to the city. Nor did we

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really imagine that the places our mother avoided were often those in which black people lived separate from whites. And never would it have struck us that these were places of deliberate poverty that were produced by, were indeed necessary to, the very metropolitan identities we were in the process of mastering. Part of a mother’s duty was to protect innocence, and insight is not easily summoned simply by walking in the city, epiphanic coincidences of movement and mind being rare. It would take the slow, deliberative, recursive skills of maturing critical thought to move walking from bodily activity to conceptual registers that tangle together personal utterance and official discourse. In this sense, then, despite miles of pavement pounding and the erratic beginnings of relational urban consciousness, we exemplified Kevin Lynch’s (1960) premise that crucial to the ‘imageability’ of urban space is the ability of people to imagine their lives in relation to a city environment of different communities, places, people …. only this conceptual connectedness could prompt the possibility of a whole, humane city. In the alienated city, Lynch proposes, people are unable to draw mental maps of their own positions or of the urban totality in which they find themselves. (This idea would subsequently be developed by Fredric Jameson into the ‘cognitive mapping’ upon whose lack the cultural logic of late capitalism thrived.) As my own narrative implies, it was only through book learning, by getting off the street, that I came to configure my memories of walking in the city. Finding examples in de Certeau’s “Walking in the City”, where writing and thinking are forms of poesis creatively connected to the bodily process of walking and the making of subjectivity, and much later in Vladislaviƒ’s “Street Addresses” in blank, a fragmented medley of the pedestrian, recollection, urban history, autobiography and imagination which slipped out of apartheid and generic gulags at every turn, I found myself making self making theory making story. Whatever the weaknesses of the special issue of Public Culture, the editors’ attempt to prompt in readers an interconnected ‘mapping’ of Johannesburg – above and beneath, high and low, across and adjacent, indeed, to blur these very categories – is surely valuable. Reading through “The Elusive Metropolis” I found myself having to acknowledge the personal ABC through which I have learnt to imagine citiness – from Appadurai, Benjamin, and the Comaroffs …to Urry, Vladislaviƒ, Williams and Zukin, and that’s not even to start listing the poets, novelists, architects, musicians, painters…. This is an all-too-obviously incomplete African-

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International city alphabet, jostling elements dated and new, compatible and unreconciled. Mine is no map; it is associated with no clear itineraries. At best, the list is a crumpled, clumsily hand-drawn, heavily over-written scrap to which I keep referring while trying to live meaningfully in what many Johannesburgers might prefer to dismiss as a provincial city at the other end of the world from the intellectual masters of the metropolitan universe. In such a broken-backed context, ‘the metropolis’ must remain part of a conflicted discourse in which African citiness is built and written into being through hopes of belonging to ‘the world’ alongside dreams of differentiated local identity able to resist global incorporation. Walking in the city in the company of the contributors to 16(3) – a more intellectual version of the metaphoric, textual flânerie that occurs each month when I wander around ‘Durban’ in reading the MetroBeat magazine sent to all Ethekwini rate payers – I again test the language in which to talk about experiences of citiness. In the context of the legislated inequalities and urban influx control of South Africa’s past, it would be massively unjust to suggest that all South Africans, now, should be content with what is all-too-often the little they have. Yet in the context of South Africa’s nominally democratic present, the right to ‘maximise’ one’s potential in a metropolis of maximum opportunity runs the risk of leading to a nation in which people determinedly pursue selfcentred, supersized lifestyles. Under this national egotistical inflation, is bigger always better, is more the most for me, is the city represented as metropolis an ideal form of identity? Possibly not. I understand the argument that it is ‘global cities’ which “have served as critical sites for the remixing and reassembling of racial identities” (Nuttall 2004:431), and that in this sense the experiential and imaginative openness of the metropolis (rather than, say, the mentality of the small-town), is an important space for the making of a democratic South African identity. But perhaps what I am reaching for in trying to make the metropolis meaningful is also an idea very small, somewhere between the comforts/confines of ‘home’ and mayoral proselytising about ‘civic responsibility’. It has to do with the capacity for sympathy, for human connection, that is not necessarily to be found in the metropolis: an ability to make the Self and its demands less metropolitan, a little smaller, in the face of the continuing degradation, indifference, xenophobia and self-serving consumerism that mark South African citiness. The new consumer metropolis, for instance, does not miraculously generate communities through consumption, or equal opportunity through equal

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access to space, since it is produced by that often brash developmentalism which sweeps aside the inevitable partners of big city success: melancholy, loss, ruin, failure, exploitation, conspicuous human and environmental calamity. The suffering body. And the familiar urban need to get away from it all to ‘the country’ which hardly exists any longer because it has been recruited into the service of triumphalist metropolitan development. The metropolis, as Simmel (1971) understood about even its early historical incarnation, generates reserve, an aversion to contact, dissociation as an elemental form of socialisation. Metropolitanism promotes both impersonality and intense personal subjectivity which are sustained through the capricious interrelation of an indiscriminate suggestibility (the promise of greater fulfillment), and blasé indifference as an assertion of personal distinction. Such elemental forms of metropolitan being are simultaneously attitudes, psychic traits, spatial features, and they write off as superfluous those aspects of the metropolis which offer no evident advantage to the individual or to a city’s individual status. Indeed, such a consciousness often refuses the relational truths of spatiality, prefers not to struggle towards a cognitive map, sets up ‘city limits’ and limits of responsibility in order to protect prioritised interests. Perhaps because of this egotistical side to the metropolis I respond positively to the niggles of uncertainty about Johannesburg which occasionally break the surface of contributions to 16(3). In concluding her piece on Y culture, for example, Nuttall expresses her intention to “remain open to the transfigurative demands that new cultural forms place on how we come to see social life, even in its most distressing dimensions” (2004:451-2). The last clause carries a quiet ambivalence about the urban identities in which Nuttall might prefer to discover more evidently imaginative, sustaining human capacity. This, to my mind, is how it should be, lest the march of metropolitanism destroy the promise and potential so many have vested in the metropolis. If metropolitan desire has inculcated behaviours and subjectivities not always appropriate to the discontinuous modernities of South Africa – Rodney Place, for example, identifies “the suburban individual” as “a completely irrelevant model for our urban situations” (2004:545) – there is nevertheless no coherent ubuntu to replace the supposedly Ubu-egotisms of ‘modernist’ white South African spatial privilege. Similarly, with substantial parts of what used to be suburban residential-retail on the city margins now incorporated into an extensive metropolitan infill that connects consumption, corporate life, and entertainment, I wonder, with the editors of 16(3), about

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the emergent poesis which is brought into being by new, contradictory types of metropolitan space. In his wish to re-imagine South African citiness, Place dismisses the suburb as “a tiny social unit .... connected to public space [only] like a vacuum cleaner plugged into an electrical grid” (2004:546), a familiar fingering of the suburbanism that is supposedly the antithesis of metropolitan cosmopolitanism. Yet many other contributors to “The Elusive Metropolis” argue that the suburb is now a complicated, relational urban space, meaningful across racial and class divisions. Maybe the suburb is a spatial arrangement that will endure because it is capable of shape-shifting, and has a human relevance beyond political correctness or the disdain of cutting-edge urban design? At the same time, I am wary of claims for new forms of sub-urbanity being touted by developers such as Moreland, presently building KwaZulu-Natal’s “New Town Centre” on Umhlanga Ridge. Their “vision” (in my severely-edited version of an egregious spew) is said to combine “the best of city, town and village” where “everything is on tap [sic]” in a “city-suburb of exclusive low-rise apartment blocks…integrated with world-class working, shopping and entertainment opportunities”. The unique selling features are “the buzz, energy and excitement of the big city and the safety and security you enjoyed growing up in a village community when you were a child” (Moreland 2005:10). What would it be like to walk in this city, with one’s children? Or is walking, for the fifty percent of South Africans who now comprise the cross-racial middle class that spends its life on extended credit, merely a nostalgic rather than realistically metropolitan poesis? The challenge for me as a South African academic energised by city experience is how to resist reifying metropolitanism into what is variously presented as a smugly achieved identity and/or as an indisputably desirable goal. Those producing ideas about cities might continue to work hard, and imaginatively, to accommodate the realities of people who are still only raggedly becoming human, never mind ‘metropolitan’. I imagine, despite my taking issue with some of their positions, that this is part of what motivated the editors of 16(3). The elusive metropolis remains a determinedly erratic rather than coherent space, one in which different practices – of walking, writing, speaking, wearing, riding, reading; indeed, of differentiated forms of these very different practices – contribute to a range of selves and sensibilities. For instance, after reading 16(3), I was left wondering when the proposed ‘anti-thesis’ of urban possibility becomes a new conceptual and even

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political dominant: whatever the “endless…trickery” (Simone 2004:424) being networked by people in inner city Johannesburg, when does an academic interest in tracking the urban edge cultures of “foot soldiers and middlemen” (2004:417) segue into an apology for drug barons, turf wars, violent illegality and an “extensive transactional economy” (2004:424) in which women are traded in syndicated barter schemes? And am I seriously expected to endorse Place’s laissez faire urban apocalypse in which, as counter to the vast wealth accumulated by a few elite Johannesburg families under apartheid, “it’s surely time for more grassroots continental capitalists to settle themselves into the city and make of the city what they will” (2004:545)? Really? This politically-correct mouthing dehumanises by pretending that an urban wild west is ‘no problem’. Political, economic and social failures not only inherited from apartheid but produced by the mismanagers of democracy shred many sections of contemporary Johannesburg, and indeed lesser South African cities, into places of poverty, overcrowding, decay, debilitation, drug dealing, plain danger. Here, I risk the charge of vestigial racism, or elegiac nostalgia for an urban past forfeited to political freedom. That is not my intention; I will not buy into the “New Town Centre”. But while I do not wish to take the familiar tack of post-apartheid studies and “approach the city as a problem to be solved” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:358), to deny the angers and inequalities which challenge even supposedly model European cities such as Paris, is to luxuriate in avoidance, to refuse the knowledge, as common among black people as white, that parts of many major cities are unsafe for anything more than a theoretical ramble. If openness to human diversity is one of the historical markers of the metropolis, it is also true that cities worldwide are increasingly intolerant of cultural difference, trying to bind their identities to claims for native rather than outside selves. Never mind that you were born in this metropolis; a properly metropolitan identity must look the part. In respect of cultural openness, Johannesburg may be worth watching as something of a test case for modern metropolitanism. “Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis” has made me think deeply about citiness. More prosaically, it is also excellent secondary reading for postgraduate courses on South African urban identity. It takes the reader headfirst into debates about Johannesburg as economic and cultural capital, as forms (and refusals) of social justice, as place of individual subjectivity, and tentative collectivity. The volume is worthwhile for the questions it makes me face about Johannesburg as a site of human “improvisation and

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qualities of flexibility and resilience” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:399) and a more austere understanding that a city, especially a metropolis, entails “the waste of affluence” (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004:399). “Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis” leaves me no less confident about how to walk the wavering, obscure line between the economies of the material and the cultural. But perhaps I must allow of Johannesburg that it is foolish to be “too hasty in trying to find a definition of the town; it’s far too big and there’s every chance of getting it wrong” (Perec 1997:62).

References Augé, Marc.

1995. Non-Places: an Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.

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2002. In the Metro. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Barthes, Roland.

1982 [1973]. Mythologies. London: Paladin.

Comaroff, Jean and John L (eds). 2001. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dening, Greg.

2003. “Culture is Talk. Living is Story.” In: Teo, Hsu-Ming and Richard White (eds). Cultural History in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press: 226-235.

Feireiss, Kristin.

1998. “Foreword”. In: Judin, Hilton and Ivan Vladislaviƒ (eds). blank: architecture apartheid and after. Cape Town/ Rotterdam: David Philip/NAi Publishers.

http://www.joburg.org.za/2003/sept/sep10_books.stm Judin, Hilton and Ivan Vladislaviƒ (eds). 1998. blank: architecture apartheid and after. Cape Town/Rotterdam: David Philip/NAi Publishers. Kentridge, William. 1992. “William Kentridge: Drawings for Projection.” Johannesburg: The Goodman Gallery. Lynch, Kevin.

1960. The Image of the City. Massachusetts, USA: The Joint Center for Urban Studies, MIT/Harvard University.

Mbembe, Achille.

2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McGregor, Liz.

2005. “Passion of the convert fires new Afropolitans.” Sunday Times 27 November: 33.

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Mda, Zakes.

1995. Ways of Dying. Cape Town: Oxford University Press South Africa.

Moreland Developers. 2005. Advertisement for “New Town Centre”. Mail & Guardian 9-14/12 :10.

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Murray, Sally-Ann. 1994. “Tribute and Attributed Meaning”. Current Writing 6(2):63-76. Perec, Georges.

1997. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin Books.

Simmel, Georg.

1971. “The Metropolis and Mental Life”. In: On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Donald N. Levine (ed). Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 324-39.

Stewart, Susan.

2005. The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

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